Nobel Week Dialogue 2012

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN—Given the number of famous scientists around, it's easy to forget the full title of the Nobel Week Dialogue includes the phrase "impact on society." But Helga Nowotny, the president of the European Research Council, was on hand to provide a remedy. Nowotny is a social scientist who spends a lot of time thinking about how science and society influence each other. She was next in line for a Nobel Week Dialogue talk.

Nowotny started out by noting genomics is often mentioned as a promising thing (like the "promise of genetic medicine" and so forth). But the term "promise," she noted, implies a contract, and she did her best to make the details of that contract explicit. The payoff of getting this contract right in the case of genetics, she suggested, might be a second Renaissance.

Although attempts to understand the natural world have existed in almost every culture, institutionalized science of the sort we practice today only dates back a few hundred years. As it has grown, it has become increasingly reliant on society for support. In return, Nowotny said, science makes a number of promises. One is the promise of information that is above the vagaries of political and religious figures.

More frequently, though, science has been viewed as offering something a bit more nebulous: progress. In this sense, Nowotny noted, genomics is just the latest in a long line of scientific developments promoted as having the potential to usher in sort of golden age.

But we're now far past the point, Nowotny said, where we believe in a simple, linear slope of progress. We tend to focus on the fact that the challenges we face are complex and often overlapping. That shouldn't obscure the fact that, in some cases, science really has delivered on its end of the promise. Nowotny showed two graphs, one showing a rapidly increasing life expectancy and another showing the number of hours worked by people in industrial societies has plunged in concert. Her point was inadvertently driven home by Steven Chu's later talk, which showed how crop yields per acre farmed have also shot up as a result of the application of science to agriculture.

(It's easy to forget both of these as you work in a high-stress work environment and get bombarded by disease-of-the-week coverage in the news media.)

The promise of genomics comes at a time when we're a bit cynical about the nature of progress and haven't fully appreciated the promises science has delivered. But Nowotny mentioned a few additional features that could make the reception to genomics different from past cases of scientific promise. For one, it's being received by a world that is now globalized. The knowledge generated by it will be able to rapidly spread to just about every culture. At the same time, the risk is that the benefits won't be. That could exacerbate existing tensions.

Nowotny also referred to the work of Edmund Husserl who, in 1936, proposed the concept of the "life world." This concept, inspired by quantum mechanics, focused on the growing gap between the world that scientists were describing and the world that is intuitive and commonly experienced by most people. Genomics and the insights it provides clearly run the risk of creating the same sort of gap between what we learn and our intuitive experiences.

But Nowotny clearly felt the payoffs of keeping that divide from widening were tremendous. She suggested we had the potential for a "second Renaissance," one that had a focus on the individual, but now placed that in the context of the similarities we share with all other humans and other species. She clearly felt there was a key role for her field (the humanities) to play in keeping the gap between science and the public from widening. But the exact means for doing so? That's a subject for a separate talk.

That now out of the way, I find that social sciences are cruelly missing from society. It's kind of aggravating how mostly everything we do is driven by profits, with little concern about impacts, and that's something social sciences could help if people started to take them seriously.

It's good to see that some social scientists are ready to share their expertise in places like that, where a lot of "pure" scientists can hear it too, and agree with it.

Science HAS delivered, and then some. What holds science back more and more is the profit dogma that plagues modern society.

So it could very well be that scientific advancements will provide a much improved life expectancy, as well as quality of life, but only for a tiny minority of the population, given the current socioeconomic climate.

But then again, that might just be an ecologic balance mechanism created by mother nature...

The talk bout lessening the gap is as old as the hills. But no one tells how to do it.

The problem is context.

In very many ways I am far richer than King Henry VIII. I own two cars, I have air conditioning and clean running water, I can play Mickey Mouse on an HDTV, and with Simvastatin will likely live twice as long as he did.

This doesn't even consider the fact that I have In n Out, sushi, ice cream, Coca Cola, and thousands of things on a daily basis he would have considered to be in the realm of kings.

I think the problem stems from the view that science replaces religion.

What problem, exactly? The article seems centered around how to unlock the promise of science in order to fulfill it's part of the contract as well as how to keep science down to earth instead of being something strange, fantastic, and hard to know.

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This view locks us into a naturalistic world view with no logical basis for purpose, value or significance.

No, this is the problem that the article was speaking of. The world isn't apparently logical and runs counter to the intuition and knowledge you gain from living.

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It is not possible to function in the world without these, so a gap forms between in our world view. Viewing science as replacing religion is like objecting to someone saying that they love you with all their heart, because you have come to the understanding that feelings are a cognitive process which takes place in the brain not the heart and therefore their statement is false. The error is mistaking a truth described functionally with physical truth.

Without you actually stating the problem I think you've created a different one than what the article is trying to deal with. How to do you make the real world something people can understand?

Religion is in fact the farthest thing in the world from a solution unless you mean to use religion as a tool to teach scientific concepts in a dogmatic way via prayers, sermons, chants, and bibles and then constantly revise them as science rewrites the basis of your religion.

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I think western thought has largely made this mistake in regards to origins and in the large scale rejection of God. We are too busy looking at the universe as a machine and asking what does it do, when we should be looking at it primarily in terms of a corporation, asking what the purpose is? What is my role?

Way to miss the point of the article.

How do you teach people how weird time, space, relativity, and light is when you cannot objectively experience any of it in your day to day life?

Religion's only offering is to say "Science is omnipotent and unknowable".

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Perhaps if we trust the bible as God's word, and that he has revealed himself to us functionally we wouldn't get caught up on the details so easily. We could then perhaps see the unifying theme of Gods gracious actions to reverse the effects of human sin and establish a new creation, progressively revealed over 1400 years through 46 different authors culminating in Jesus coming in to the world as God incarnate. Then we might get some proper perspective.

The talk bout lessening the gap is as old as the hills. But no one tells how to do it.

The problem is context.

In very many ways I am far richer than King Henry VIII. I own two cars, I have air conditioning and clean running water, I can play Mickey Mouse on an HDTV, and with Simvastatin will likely live twice as long as he did.

This doesn't even consider the fact that I have In n Out, sushi, ice cream, Coca Cola, and thousands of things on a daily basis he would have considered to be in the realm of kings.

EDIT: I've misunderstood and wrote the wrong response. My apologies.

There is no easy way to do it except trial and error. This is a problem described by Christopher Alexander where a mud hut (or any design) is iterated over the course of millions of man-years.

If we knew how to make science, scientific thinking, and scientific understanding accessible to many more people we would inherently have many more scientists.

I believe an excellent way to decrease the gap would be to institute an educational system that encourages questions and struggling against difficulties, rather than simply accepting things at point blank. Even things that are considered "common knowledge," or facts should not be restrained from questioning, as it creates a certain incredulity and thirst for knowledge. Basically, less memorization, more understanding.

. We could then perhaps see the unifying theme of Gods gracious actions to reverse the effects of human sin

Is this the same God who blamed his creations for His not bothering to put a fence around His special Trees? It seems what really pissed him off was not getting to watch them running around naked in the Garden any more (Gen 3:11). The same God who later drowned his Garden, and everything else in the world, instead of, you know, acting like a parent and teaching His children how to behave and right from wrong? Is this the same God who sent his own Son to be tortured as a sacrifice to Himself for us breaking His rules? I refuse to believe in such a sick and twisted god.

I believe an excellent way to decrease the gap would be to institute an educational system that encourages questions and struggling against difficulties, rather than simply accepting things at point blank. Even things that are considered "common knowledge," or facts should not be restrained from questioning, as it creates a certain incredulity and thirst for knowledge. Basically, less memorization, more understanding.

Wisdom FTW yo.

Okay, so you're saying every one has to reinvent the wheel every generation because you can't accept what everyone ahead of you has already done?

The talk bout lessening the gap is as old as the hills. But no one tells how to do it.

...

There is no easy way to do it except trial and error. This is a problem described by Christopher Alexander where a mud hut (or any design) is iterated over the course of millions of man-years.

If we knew how to make science, scientific thinking, and scientific understanding accessible to many more people we would inherently have many more scientists.

Bridging the gap between our intuitive experience and the details of 'how it actually works' is the proper role of businessmen and engineers. The vast majority of humans only experience science mediated through a business transaction or through technical support. The great increase of farm productivity is indirectly experienced at the supermarket instead of everyone actually spending one day per year growing food. Have you called AT&T Support lately? These people have incentive, backed by trade secret and IP law, to NOT disclose any useful information about their processes. The existence and widening of this experience vs understanding gap suggests these classes of people are currently dysfunctional.

I believe an excellent way to decrease the gap would be to institute an educational system that encourages questions and struggling against difficulties, rather than simply accepting things at point blank. Even things that are considered "common knowledge," or facts should not be restrained from questioning, as it creates a certain incredulity and thirst for knowledge. Basically, less memorization, more understanding.

Wisdom FTW yo.

Okay, so you're saying every one has to reinvent the wheel every generation because you can't accept what everyone ahead of you has already done?

Lol, no.

I'm saying people should be encouraged to learn why things work, as opposed to just blindly memorizing things. That way, they can used the gained knowledge to form, or at least gain an idea of, am understanding of the science itself. When someone understands something, they are less likely to fear it, and more readily trust conclusions based on the same methods.

It is the difference between knowing big rocks are heavier than small rocks and knowing what mass is, and how it relates to an objects weight on a given planetary body. It is good to know big rocks are heavier, but is important to understand why.

I would use the word biotechnology rather than genomics to characterize the major long term trend. Basically mature biotechnology will be able to engineer chemical systems with the same order of complexity as those that manifest themselves as living organisms. If you want a precedent for the impact on society, think Galileo. Then multiply by a factor of ten or maybe one hundred. Coping with this development will be difficult for all ideologies. That includes those that want to view science as the pursuit of some special virtue lead by some set of high priests with a priviledged connection to the truth. Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

I guess I can forgive a non-native speaker like Dr. Nowotny for misunderstanding the phrase "promise of ___" or "promising", but Mr. Timmer should know better. It means "the quality of potential excellence" (New Oxford American dictionary) or "indication of future excellence or achievement" (dictionary.com).

I'm saying people should be encouraged to learn why things work, as opposed to just blindly memorizing things. That way, they can used the gained knowledge to form, or at least gain an idea of, am understanding of the science itself. When someone understands something, they are less likely to fear it, and more readily trust conclusions based on the same methods.

It is the difference between knowing big rocks are heavier than small rocks and knowing what mass is, and how it relates to an objects weight on a given planetary body. It is good to know big rocks are heavier, but is important to understand why.

Can you really understand all the "whys" without memorizing huge amounts of what people before you have calculated and named?

I can't explain gravity to the extent of current human knowledge because I don't know the words and numbers. Have to memorize other people's words, numbers and meanings to understand. Would rather invent my own system to understand how to move rocks…then, for it to be useful to other people, they would have to memorize my way of understanding it.

Sciences and arts both have this problem. Much to learn from previous generation, then short time to research and invent the really new things. More information made by this generation, more to learn for next one, unless some of knowledge is discarded. To keep learning more and more without losing previous knowledge, necessary to increase lifespans, and then expand wetware too. But then, funny questions of purpose of life will still remain. And faced with a choice of being small people standing on shoulders of giants, some would rather claim to be giants themselves. More chance to pass on their own genes that way.

Maybe our species will just keep riding invisible elephants until demise, on a fool's errand to try and make a map larger than the land our elephants walk on.

I guess I can forgive a non-native speaker like Dr. Nowotny for misunderstanding the phrase "promise of ___" or "promising", but Mr. Timmer should know better. It means "the quality of potential excellence" (New Oxford American dictionary) or "indication of future excellence or achievement" (dictionary.com).

No contract is implied.

There is one even if you don't think so. Every time there is a science thread and it is asked why we should invest in any research at all then you meet someone who expects something from said promise.

How do you teach people how weird time, space, relativity, and light is when you cannot objectively experience any of it in your day to day life?

I guess instead of saying "I love you with all my heart" you could say "I love you with a significant portion of the neurons in my brain", but so what? What are you trying to express? The question I was thinking while reading this article is why do we want to explain everything in terms of a materialist ontology? Because I think in doing so we can miss the things that really matter.

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Religion's only offering is to say "Science is omnipotent and unknowable".

Quite the opposite. I think it would say that science is knowable but not omnipotent

Is this the same God who blamed his creations for His not bothering to put a fence around His special Trees? It seems what really pissed him off was not getting to watch them running around naked in the Garden any more (Gen 3:11). The same God who later drowned his Garden, and everything else in the world, instead of, you know, acting like a parent and teaching His children how to behave and right from wrong? Is this the same God who sent his own Son to be tortured as a sacrifice to Himself for us breaking His rules? I refuse to believe in such a sick and twisted god.

There might have been interpretation errors here and there. The Bible was written first in Hebrew, later translated into Latin and English, and much later in modern English. Two thousand years in several languages.

Sometimes it's like a chicken talking to a duck.

"Do you understand me?"

"Yeah, sort of. But can you repeat that line one more time?"

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( who's name means "judge God" in Hebrew, and I judge Him lacking.)

We do not judge God. He is either your God or this guy's God and not your God, you just do not have the rights to judge Him.

How do you teach people how weird time, space, relativity, and light is when you cannot objectively experience any of it in your day to day life?

I guess instead of saying "I love you with all my heart" you could say "I love you with a significant portion of the neurons in my brain", but so what? What are you trying to express? The question I was thinking while reading this article is why do we want to explain everything in terms of a materialist ontology? Because I think in doing so we can miss the things that really matter.

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Religion's only offering is to say "Science is omnipotent and unknowable".

Quite the opposite. I think it would say that science is knowable but not omnipotent

To the average layperson I think science is as knowable as God.

I have to struggle to understand some of science, most people I've met couldn't even get past the valence electrons of the atom.

The reason I said science is omnipotent is that with science we have given ourselves powers that people have traditionally ascribed to God.

I'm a little confused by the article - at the beginning it identifies Nowotny as a "social scientist," and then near the end of the article, it describes her field as "the humanities." Which is it?

Her talk does strike me as kind of perfunctory, though: art and literature have been dealing with scientific knowledge for as long as we've been looking doing organized science. The 20's and 30's were filled with people trying to apply things that scientists were learning about quantum physics pretty much as soon as these discoveries were made public. (Attempts in literature mostly related to noncausality). The same is true of Darwin and Freud.

Society has also been attempting to apply insights from the social sciences for as long as they have existed, although with results that are much more mixed.

The reason I said science is omnipotent is that with science we have given ourselves powers that people have traditionally ascribed to God.

People have always been ascribing themselves attributes of God

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5)

The Egyptian pharaohs had been calling themselves the sons of god before God himself existed. The Egyptian dynasties existed around 2800 years before Abraham was born. The Bible itself is predated by the Egyptian dynasties by almost 3000 years.

The talk bout lessening the gap is as old as the hills. But no one tells how to do it.

The problem is context.

In very many ways I am far richer than King Henry VIII. I own two cars, I have air conditioning and clean running water, I can play Mickey Mouse on an HDTV, and with Simvastatin will likely live twice as long as he did.

Of course your piece of the pie is bigger in absolute terms, but when measured against the whole pie, it is quite a bit smaller than Henry VIII's. You might own two cars, but your share of influence among all of humanity is lower. Unfortunately, it seems that the richest among us measure their wealth in terms of control over the rest of us, rather than in absolute terms.

I would use the word biotechnology rather than genomics to characterize the major long term trend. Basically mature biotechnology will be able to engineer chemical systems with the same order of complexity as those that manifest themselves as living organisms. If you want a precedent for the impact on society, think Galileo. Then multiply by a factor of ten or maybe one hundred. Coping with this development will be difficult for all ideologies. That includes those that want to view science as the pursuit of some special virtue lead by some set of high priests with a priviledged connection to the truth. Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

Reductionism, while very logical and apparent in a biological sense, does not lend itself to value.

You say "better"; better by what criteria? What makes your idea of 'better' better than others?

Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

Reductionism, while very logical and apparent in a biological sense, does not lend itself to value.

You say "better"; better by what criteria? What makes your idea of 'better' better than others?

Actually, reductionism taken to its logical conclusions illuminates and defines value. A reduction of existence to pure materialism at last reveals the bedrock of all moral and ethical value, and renders the libertarian non-interference principle self-evident as the sole irreducible moral and ethical law.

That is, when we understand and accept that all people are no more or less than material beings--clear in their origin and function, bound only by the laws of physics and without mysterious supernatural external forces or ineffable internal feelings dictating otherwise--we're confronted by the reality that we're just simple, largely interchangeable organisms. We're not (all of us or any of us, whether individually or in collectives) special and unique beings with privileged statuses. As such, our rights and entitlements are all identical, and must therefore extend only so far as they don't encroach on the rights of any other. Our own individual ideas and beliefs and feelings and desires are no more or less "right" and privileged and important than those of the billions of other humans who exist. Whatever any individual's ideas of morality or ethics, of justice or law, etc., may be--however sophisticated or arguably beneficial--he has no more right to impose those views on any other individual than that second individual has to impose his own views on the first. We're thus left with the right to not be imposed upon or interfered with as the sole irreducible right, and therefore the protection and promotion of this right as the primary and universal moral and ethical law.

What is "good" or "better" is therefore anything which allows the individual to do whatever he wishes to do more fully, so long as it doesn't interfere with the fundamental right of another individual to not be imposed upon or interfered with.

This seems like it was a very interesting talk and very relevant to the many discussions we have here at Ars concerning science communication. I searched a little bit and it turns out Helga Nowotny she's written a couple of books that may be of interest to those who want to go a little deeper on this topic:

Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

Reductionism, while very logical and apparent in a biological sense, does not lend itself to value.

You say "better"; better by what criteria? What makes your idea of 'better' better than others?

Actually, reductionism taken to its logical conclusions illuminates and defines value. A reduction of existence to pure materialism at last reveals the bedrock of all moral and ethical value, and renders the libertarian non-interference principle self-evident as the sole irreducible moral and ethical law.

That is, when we understand and accept that all people are no more or less than material beings--clear in their origin and function, bound only by the laws of physics and without mysterious supernatural external forces or ineffable internal feelings dictating otherwise--we're confronted by the reality that we're just simple, largely interchangeable organisms. We're not (all of us or any of us, whether individually or in collectives) special and unique beings with privileged statuses. As such, our rights and entitlements are all identical, and must therefore extend only so far as they don't encroach on the rights of any other. Our own individual ideas and beliefs and feelings and desires are no more or less "right" and privileged and important than those of the billions of other humans who exist. Whatever any individual's ideas of morality or ethics, of justice or law, etc., may be--however sophisticated or arguably beneficial--he has no more right to impose those views on any other individual than that second individual has to impose his own views on the first. We're thus left with the right to not be imposed upon or interfered with as the sole irreducible right, and therefore the protection and promotion of this right as the primary and universal moral and ethical law.

What is "good" or "better" is therefore anything which allows the individual to do whatever he wishes to do more fully, so long as it doesn't interfere with the fundamental right of another individual to not be imposed upon or interfered with.

You may want it to follow, but it does not. Not even remotely. There is no sacred "noninterference directive" discovered at the bottom of the well of reductionism. As so many others have pointed out, there are no directives at all, no morality.

Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

Reductionism, while very logical and apparent in a biological sense, does not lend itself to value.

You say "better"; better by what criteria? What makes your idea of 'better' better than others?

Actually, reductionism taken to its logical conclusions illuminates and defines value. A reduction of existence to pure materialism at last reveals the bedrock of all moral and ethical value, and renders the libertarian non-interference principle self-evident as the sole irreducible moral and ethical law.

[snip for length]

You may want it to follow, but it does not. Not even remotely. There is no sacred "noninterference directive" discovered at the bottom of the well of reductionism. As so many others have pointed out, there are no directives at all, no morality.

Quite the opposite; Immanuel Kant spent much ink proving that there is, and many have improved on these proofs since then. I can't duplicate the voluminous efforts of moral philosophers in a brief forum discussion any more than I can exhaustively prove E = mc2 in one, but the works containing such proofs are nonetheless available. Philosophy (which relies on the inherent relationships of logic) is no more wooly and un-provable than math (which relies on the inherent relationships of numbers). So let me posit something simple and largely self-evident: when we're all understood as essentially identical and largely-interchangeable organisms, we're left either with your conclusion that there are no rights and entitlements at all and anything goes, or we're left with my conclusion from the previous post--that whatever rights and entitlements we do have are all identical, and must therefore extend only so far as they don't encroach on the rights of any other; that our own individual ideas, beliefs, feelings, and desires are no more or less "right" and privileged and important than those of the billions of other humans who exist, and therefore that whatever any individual's ideas of morality or ethics, of justice or law, etc., may be, he has no more right to impose those views on any other individual than that second individual has to impose his own views on the first; that we're thus left with the right to not be imposed upon or interfered with as the sole irreducible right, and therefore the protection and promotion of this right as the primary and universal moral and ethical law.

Left with those two alternatives--no inherent law or an inherent law of universal respect and inviolability for every person--it would be clear and obvious to most people which would be the most beneficial for us both as individuals and as a collective civilization. Quoting Kant, "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."

I'd go further and argue that the libertarian noninterference principle ("the right to not be interfered with") arises spontaneously, as a moral and ethical Big Bang of sorts, from that very moral and ethical vacuum you allude to as being caused by reductionism and materialism. Note that "the right to not be interfered with" is essentially a negative right, not a positive one--it's not the right for an individual to be able to do something; instead it's the right of an individual to not have something done to him. In the complete absence of positive, affirmative rights, a negative right becomes the only viable one--which leaves a natural choice between this one inherent negative right or the sort of amorality you allude to. Furthermore, since complete amorality isn't a self-sustaining state of being--in such a vacuum people can and will impose their own moral order on others--respect for the negative right to not be interfered with becomes the only fundamental, irreducible state which is sustainable.

Essentially human beings will have to come to grips with the reality that we are just chemical systems that manifest the imperfections expected by a trial and error design process.. Humans will have to cope with the problem of what to do with a technology that can transform our very being into a system that works much better.

Reductionism, while very logical and apparent in a biological sense, does not lend itself to value.

You say "better"; better by what criteria? What makes your idea of 'better' better than others?

Actually, reductionism taken to its logical conclusions illuminates and defines value. A reduction of existence to pure materialism at last reveals the bedrock of all moral and ethical value, and renders the libertarian non-interference principle self-evident as the sole irreducible moral and ethical law.

[snip for length]

You may want it to follow, but it does not. Not even remotely. There is no sacred "noninterference directive" discovered at the bottom of the well of reductionism. As so many others have pointed out, there are no directives at all, no morality.

Quite the opposite; Immanuel Kant spent much ink proving that there is, and many have improved on these proofs since then. I can't duplicate the voluminous efforts of moral philosophers in a brief forum discussion any more than I can exhaustively prove E = mc2 in one, but the works containing such proofs are nonetheless available. Philosophy (which relies on the inherent relationships of logic) is no more wooly and un-provable than math (which relies on the inherent relationships of numbers). So let me posit something simple and largely self-evident: when we're all understood as essentially identical and largely-interchangeable organisms, we're left either with your conclusion that there are no rights and entitlements at all and anything goes, or we're left with my conclusion from the previous post--that whatever rights and entitlements we do have are all identical, and must therefore extend only so far as they don't encroach on the rights of any other; that our own individual ideas, beliefs, feelings, and desires are no more or less "right" and privileged and important than those of the billions of other humans who exist, and therefore that whatever any individual's ideas of morality or ethics, of justice or law, etc., may be, he has no more right to impose those views on any other individual than that second individual has to impose his own views on the first; that we're thus left with the right to not be imposed upon or interfered with as the sole irreducible right, and therefore the protection and promotion of this right as the primary and universal moral and ethical law.

Left with those two alternatives--no inherent law or an inherent law of universal respect and inviolability for every person--it would be clear and obvious to most people which would be the most beneficial for us both as individuals and as a collective civilization. Quoting Kant, "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."

I'd go further and argue that the libertarian noninterference principle ("the right to not be interfered with") arises spontaneously, as a moral and ethical Big Bang of sorts, from that very moral and ethical vacuum you allude to as being caused by reductionism and materialism. Note that "the right to not be interfered with" is essentially a negative right, not a positive one--it's not the right for an individual to be able to do something; instead it's the right of an individual to not have something done to him. In the complete absence of positive, affirmative rights, a negative right becomes the only viable one--which leaves a natural choice between this one inherent negative right or the sort of amorality you allude to. Furthermore, since complete amorality isn't a self-sustaining state of being--in such a vacuum people can and will impose their own moral order on others--respect for the negative right to not be interfered with becomes the only fundamental, irreducible state which is sustainable.

This is a great example of how real world experience does not match logical deduction.

In the regular world humans are not essentially the same. Some are bigger, female, speak different languages. After education, they have specialized skills not easily replaced. After conversations, some are friends. We have found it convenient to maintain a legal fiction of equality, consistent with the libertarian logic above, but that breaks down when a scarce resource (food, oil) is needed and we must decide who gets it and who goes without. Those who got the resource are now materially better than those who did not, and that advantage will help them win the next scarcity contest. A class separation begins. Material-based classes have risen and fallen for millenia.

None of that means Kant or the Libertarians are wrong. Kant's conclusions are so far from common experience that anyone who is not a student of philosophy will reject them without any thought. The benefit to society of Kant's work is much reduced because of the thoughtless rejection. Much of science suffers similarly.